Tax time has a way of making things real. You sit down with the numbers and the numbers sit there looking back at you. Last year, we spent 20% more than we earned. I stared at that for a while. Then I felt it — that tightness in my chest. We’re moving backwards. Something’s wrong. This is how it falls apart.
That feeling has a long history in me. Longer than this marriage. And I think it’s worth being honest about.
Money Meant Something It Shouldn’t Have
I grew up poor. Not in a way that makes for a cute story — poor in a way that leaves a mark. Somewhere in there I picked up a belief I’ve been carrying ever since: money is a measure of a person. People who have more are smarter, more capable, more worth something. I was less because we had less.
I still catch that voice sometimes. A friend mentions what they’re earning and there’s this little thing that goes off in me — see, they figured it out. That’s not ambition. That’s an old wound. There’s a difference, and I’m still learning to tell them apart.
My faith has started to chip away at that. Slowly. But I want to be careful, because it’s easy to spiritualize your way around a practical problem. It’s easy to say “money isn’t everything” when your bills are paid. When you’re in survival mode — more month than money, kids to feed, rent overdue — you don’t have time to sit with what your relationship with money is. You need money. So I’m not trying to skip past the pressure. The pressure is real. The belief underneath it might also be worth looking at. Eventually.
I Thought We Were Prepared
Before I got married, I was living significantly below my income. Savings. A system. I thought: my future wife and I had the financial conversations. We’d be fine.
We were not immediately fine in this area.
Here’s what nobody prepares you for — having a conversation about money with your future spouse is not the same as knowing what they actually do when they’re exhausted and the account is low. You don’t know what “being responsible” means to another person until you’re both in it. Until you’re having the argument at 10pm. Until you’ve seen how fear shows up in each of you, because it doesn’t show up the same way in two people who came from two different places.
I’ve heard that most couples struggle with this in the early years — and that’s with nothing extraordinary happening. We self-funded our wedding. We self-funded the birth of our daughter. Those are real, expensive things that happened close together. I try to remember that when I’m looking at year-end numbers and feeling like we failed.
Fear Doesn’t Make Good Decisions
When I saw that 20% deficit, everything in me said: clamp down. Beans and rice. No spending. Lock it down until we hit some number I’ve decided means we’re okay.
That’s fear talking. Fear makes a terrible financial advisor.
It’s reactive. It doesn’t account for the other person in the marriage. When I’m scared, it’s easier to ask what did you spend than to sit with we have a problem to solve together. Easier to find someone to blame than to be a team.
We’ve had the emotional arguments. A lot of them. But the ones that moved us somewhere were the ones where we stopped being on opposite sides of the spreadsheet and started asking: what are we building? What do we want? And practically — how do we do that?
We’re still figuring it out. But we’re figuring it out together, which is different than where we started.
The Reason We’re Actually Here
Part of why we’re living overseas — in Vietnam, earning in dollars and spending in a local currency with a lot more buying power — is to solve this specific problem. Not to run from it. To create margin. To stop spending more than we make.
It’s working. We’re saving again.
But the mindset is slower than the math. I’m still wrestling with the line between being responsible — you can’t grow crops you don’t plant — and using money as the thing I’m actually trusting. There’s a parable I keep coming back to (the Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25:14-30) where a master gives his servants money to invest while he’s gone. They weren’t investing their own money. It was his. I haven’t fully worked that out yet.
Where We’re At
Tax season, baby.
We don’t have a clean ending. We’re two years into a marriage that started with a self-funded wedding, added a baby, moved internationally, and came out the other side — still together, still talking, still daily learning how to do this.
What I’d say so far: it takes real time to learn to manage money as a team. Not as an excuse — as a fact. The goal has to be spending less than you earn. That part isn’t negotiable. But getting there is a process, and you have to be honest with each other during it, not just at the finish line.
The fear doesn’t disappear when you name it. But naming it helps. Knowing that my anxiety around money is partly an old wound, partly a real responsibility, and partly something I’m still wrestling with — that’s more useful than pretending it’s a math problem with a clean solution.
It’s never just a math problem.
If you’re in this season — learning how to manage money together, figuring out how to fight about it less and solve it more — we’d love to hear from you. What’s been the hardest part? Drop it in the comments.